Bone grafting is often used in orthopedic procedures to either stimulate bone to heal or provide support to the skeleton. Bone grafts are bones that are transplanted from one area of the skeleton to another. Bone or bone-like materials in bone grafts may come from the patient (autograft bone), from a donor (allograft bone) or from a man-made source (alloplast bone). In many cases the bone grafts may be used to fill in a space created by disease, injury, deformity, or surgical procedure such as spinal fusion.
The autograft bones (chips) may be harvested from the bones of the hip, the ribs or legs during the same operating procedures. Subsequently the harvested bone chips may be cut into smaller pieces creating bone powder. The autograft bone powder may be mixed with selected fluids to create a bone paste.
The available bone mills generally suffer from either inability to reproduce bone powder with predictable bone particle size distribution or damage the bone particles by transferring degrading heat to the bone particles.
These problems may also arise in other milling contexts. Accordingly, a need may exist for an apparatus for milling material that may create milled material with a predictable particle size distribution without damaging the material by transferring degrading heat to the milled material.